Evening Post
by Alchemine
Summary: Dumbledore receives a letter and ponders youth, age, love and friendship. Complete.
1. Minerva's Missive

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

_Rap-rap-rap_.

The knock was brisk and businesslike. Only the prefects and the professors knocked at the door of the Deputy Headmaster's office that way. Everyone else tapped as timidly as mice, or lurked in the corridor waiting until he happened to come out.

Dumbledore didn't understand it. He thought he was very approachable. Grandfatherly, even. Students never seemed frightened of him in lessons. Perhaps it was just the sight of the official title on his nameplate that gave them pause.

When he opened the door, it was indeed a prefect who stood there – one of his sixth-year Gryffindors.

"Oh, good evening, Arthur. Can I help you with something?"

The boy grinned, reached under his cloak and produced a very ruffled-looking snowy owl.

"I found him in the courtyard," he explained. "He has a letter addressed to you. I think he couldn't make it all the way to your window. He looks on the feeble side – ARGH!"

"What happened?"

"He bit me!"

"Sugar, I've spoken to you about that before," remonstrated Dumbledore as he gathered the owl into his hands. "You should be glad Mr. Weasley brought you inside. It's very cold out there."

Sugar hooted, clearly not feeling a bit sorry.

"He can be rather touchy," Dumbledore said apologetically to Arthur.

"No kidding!" the boy said. He was sucking his finger – the owl's sharp beak had drawn blood. "Maybe the Muggles have the right idea, using humans to carry their letters. I've never heard of a Muggle postman biting his customers!"

"Let me see. My goodness, it's awfully deep, isn't it? Perhaps you should go to the infirmary –"

"Oh, it'll be all right," Arthur said. "I've got to get back to the tower. We're having a party for Molly's birthday. I only went out to fetch some flowers from the greenhouse."

"Ah, I see – a party. Don't make too much noise." Dumbledore gave the boy his best Deputy Headmaster stare, but his voice was indulgent. "I would hate to have to come round and tell you to keep it down. I might be forced to consume a piece of birthday cake while I was there, and maybe have a butterbeer as well. Not at all fitting for someone in my position."

Arthur laughed, knowing his head of house all too well to take him seriously. "I'll keep a piece aside for you, sir." And with that, he hurried away, a solid, dependable-looking figure in slightly rumpled black robes, his steps light at the prospect of an evening full of friends and fun – and possibly flirtation as well, Dumbledore reflected. He suspected Arthur was fonder of Molly than most people realized.

"It doesn't seem so long ago I was that young myself," he said to the owl in his arms. "What about you? Do you remember what it was like to be an owlet?"

_I try to forget_, Sugar thought grumpily. _It was a very silly time of life. You'd best read your letter now. I went to all sorts of trouble bringing it here. _

Dumbledore didn't know what Sugar had replied, but he did think he'd spent more than enough time at work for a Saturday night. Locking his office door behind him, he bore both the owl and the message off to his own apartments.

As he walked, he stroked the old bird's head gently. Sugar looked exhausted – he wasn't really strong enough to carry letters regularly anymore, but he got so offended when Minerva used other owls for her correspondence that she still sent him occasionally to soothe his feelings. Dumbledore had dreadful visions of Sugar getting tired somewhere over the water one day and plummeting into the waves like a small bundle of white washing. Sometimes he sneaked away to Hogsmeade to post particularly heavy return envelopes, then sent Sugar back with a one-sheet decoy message. It was amazing how far both he and Minerva would go to keep an owl happy.

That was whom the letter was from, of course. Minerva was nearly three months into her new position at Beauxbatons, where she was overseeing the Transfiguration professor's research on Animagi. She'd been a regular, faithful correspondent since she'd been away – one letter per week, always on Saturday, always two full pages, front and back, covered in her loopy-spiky script. This letter was late. He'd been waiting for it all day.

Once safely within his own sitting room, Dumbledore got out the owl treats and watched in amusement as Sugar wolfed down three in rapid succession.

"No, no more," he said when the owl pecked at his fingers in search of another treat. "Minerva will be angry if I let you eat yourself sick. Go and rest." It was impossible, of course, but he could have sworn that Sugar gave him a disdainful look before spreading his wings and flapping a bit stiffly to the top of the wardrobe. Ah, well, the cranky creature could sulk if he wished. Dumbledore had a letter to read. He conjured up a cup of coffee with cream, settled himself in a purple-plush armchair and got to it.

"Dear Albus,

It snowed every day again this week."

That was vintage Minerva, Dumbledore thought, smiling over the opening sentence. Her letters were always beautifully written, but they tended toward descriptions of how the weather had been and what she had worked on that week. If he wanted gossip and intimate detail, he had to ask her for it straight out.

"Everything is white and lovely – like the whole world's covered in icing sugar – but it's so cold," the letter continued. "I have to keep scraping off my window so I can look out. No one but the caretaker is allowed to enchant any part of the building, and he won't put an anti-freeze spell on the glass. When I asked him, he said I should try to appreciate winter's natural beauty, and recited a little poem about the first frost of the season. How very French of him. Natural beauty is all well and good, but being able to see outside is important too, don't you think?"

Still smiling, Dumbledore kept reading, looking for the answer to the question he had dropped casually into his last letter to her. He tried very hard not to pry too much into her personal affairs – no pun intended – but he hadn't been able to resist asking if she had met anyone who might turn out to be more than a friend. Though she'd gone to Beauxbatons solely for the purpose of furthering her career, he had hoped she would find more than just professional fulfillment while she was there. Poppy Pomfrey, who was only a year or two her senior, had been married for a decade and was the mother of three boys, the eldest of whom would be starting at Hogwarts the autumn after next. Minerva didn't seem to be troubled by her own lack of husband and children, but Dumbledore thought she should at least have the opportunity to decide whether she wanted them or not.

He scanned down the page – aha, there it was.

"I knew you'd get around to asking about my love life sooner or later. Well, you'll be happy to hear that I'm involved with not just one man, but five. I see a different one every weeknight. (I've made a little timetable so I can keep them all straight.) Weekends I leave free to wash my hair and write to you."

Dumbledore stared at this paragraph in surprise for a minute, then realized she was joking. Sometimes Minerva's humor was so dry that it almost went unnoticed. Besides, drawing up a schedule for suitors was not too far from something she might actually do. He turned the sheet of parchment over and read on:

"Got you.

No, Albus, I am not 'keeping company' with anyone, as you so delicately put it. Not for lack of opportunity, though. The Astronomy professor, Monsieur L'Etoile, keeps hanging around outside my office and trying to sit next to me at dinner. I'm sure if I opened the door and whistled right now, he'd be in here before I could say 'bon soir.'"

Now a frown crossed Dumbledore's face. Was this person harassing her?

"Stop frowning. You're being overprotective. He's utterly harmless, and really very nice – the worst you need fear is that he'll buy me too many flowers. I've been trying to think of a way to tell him I'm not interested without hurting his feelings. It's impossible, of course. I ought to know."

The last part stung a little. He wondered if she had been thinking of the awkward scene that had played out between them so long ago when she'd written it. Did she still remember that? Heaven knew he couldn't forget.

Young as she was now, she'd been dangerously young then, and in the throes of a hopeless crush on him, her friend and mentor – and one spring night on the lawn outside, she'd yielded to impulse and flung her arms around him for a kiss.

He'd tried very hard to let her down easily, pushing her away as gently as possible and explaining that he would not, could not engage in that sort of activity with her. What no one but he knew, however, was that the most difficult part of the experience had not been rebuffing her advances, but hiding how tempted he'd been to accept them. He'd had no business even entertaining the notion. Until that moment, she'd always been like a daughter to him. How could he have considered, even for a heartbeat –

It had been for the best, turning her down. He had thought so at the time, and still did. To let a girl that age chain herself to a man so much older would have been selfish in the extreme.

Shaking his head, where the grey was beginning to make serious inroads into the auburn, he went back to her letter again.

"Really, Albus, you worry too much over nothing. I'm quite content with things the way they are. It's the Victorian in you that thinks I should be married by now. Or are you simply hoping to pair me off with someone to get me out of your hair?"

She was uncomfortably close to the mark there, Dumbledore thought, though she had most likely been teasing him again. The truth was, he did want to see her securely ensconced in a relationship, not only for her happiness, but to remove all temptation and possibility from himself forever. It wasn't as if he sat around mooning over her day in and day out. He didn't. But every now and again the thought crossed his mind: did she still feel the same way she had all those years ago? What would she do if he – never mind!

Even as he longed for her to write and say that she'd fallen in love, he dreaded the inevitable day it would happen. He'd told her to take her feelings away and offer them to someone more appropriate, but the idea of her actually doing so – of her belonging to some man, no matter how good, how kind, how right for her – was agonizing.

And whether he liked to admit it or not, he was secretly relieved to hear that the moment hadn't arrived yet.

_Hypocrite!_ he chided himself. _You'd like to have it both ways, wouldn't you, to feel righteous and noble and still keep her all to yourself? Ah, you aren't nearly so just as you wish people to think._

He pushed those uselessly self-damning thoughts away and read more of the letter, noting with approval that she'd done some sightseeing and visited a few of the theatres in Paris in addition to teaching and researching. That was good. His lectures about balancing out work with leisure must have taken hold at last.

Toward the bottom of the second page, Minerva's script became a little wobbly, as if her hand had been trembling. Perhaps she'd been tired.

"I still mean to come back to Hogwarts for Christmas," she'd written. "This place is even more beautiful than everyone says it is, but it isn't home. I don't think it ever will be. I want to spend the holiday with you, where I belong."

After those lines, the writing firmed up again, and she finished off in a rush:

"Besides, it wouldn't be Christmas without you gobbling sweets and complaining that no one gave you any socks. You'll be sorry when you see the ones I found for you in town. The women here knit them. Horrible, thick peasant knitting, with wool that smells and feels as if it came straight from the sheep's back.

I bought you six pairs.

Yours,

M."

Dumbledore chuckled, then quickly sobered and sat looking at the last two words for a while as the fire burned lower and his coffee cup cooled at his feet. It was only a standard closing, a pat phrase, but it made him think. She was his, in a way. He'd taught her, guided her, helped to mold her into the person she was. More than his surrogate child, more even than his friend, she was part of him, and always would be. And that was enough, even if a small, secret corner of his heart wished things could be different between them.

_A fool's wish, Albus._ But if there was one thing he'd learned in life, it was that no amount of experience and magical ability was enough to keep a man from being a bit of a fool.

With these thoughts for cold company, Dumbledore folded Minerva's letter and tucked it into his table drawer with the others. Then he put out the lamps and went to bed alone.


	2. Dumbledore's Defense

Like skiing during the winter holidays and touching the marble angel in the foyer for luck, bragging about their school was an age-old tradition among the staff and students of Beauxbatons. Admittedly, they had a lot to brag about. The palace had been designed in the last quarter of the seventeenth century by Francois d'Orbay, the same architect who had put the finishing touches on Versailles. Nearly every practicing French wizard of the day had contributed magic toward its construction, and the results were amazing, to say the least.

Upon arriving there in September, Minerva had been impressed by the dizzying array of fountains, statues, mirrors and ornamental gardens. But she'd positively fallen in love with her bedroom, and especially with her bed. It was a huge, decadent thing at least twelve feet wide and five feet high, heaped with enough feather mattresses and velvet comforters to have satisfied the girl in the "Princess and the Pea" story. Minerva needed a stepstool to get onto it, but once she was there, it was so delicious to lie upon that she'd taken to retiring earlier and earlier every night to prolong her enjoyment.

She'd already been there for nearly an hour on this Sunday evening, drifting in a pleasant half-sleep, when something started banging away at her window. Naturally, the glass was all frosted over _again_, and she had no idea at first what was making the noise. With a groan of annoyance, she climbed down from her perch and stumbled over to breathe on the windowpane and scrub at it with her nightgown sleeve until she could see.

When she finally succeeded, she was greeted by the alarming vision of two round yellow eyes staring back at her. Then the owl outside let loose with a screech she could hear even through the glass - a sort of "Don't just stand there, woman, open the bloody window!" screech - and she quickly flipped up the catch and let it in on a gust of icy air.

_Oh, no - Sugar!_ she thought in horror. Dumbledore's glittering purple ink was evident on the message the strange owl carried, but he should have sent his reply with Sugar, unless Sugar was ill - or hurt - or worse. The idea was intolerable. Sugar had been her constant companion since she'd arrived at Hogwarts nearly twenty years before, a spindly little girl scowling fiercely at everyone to hide her nervousness at the prospect of living with strangers. She knew he couldn't last forever, or even much longer, in spite of all the good-health charms she'd lovingly worked over him, but wanted to postpone the inevitable as long as she could. If something had happened to him ...

As soon as she got a better look at the letter, she relaxed. Dumbledore knew all too well how her mind worked, and had scrawled "OPEN ME (SUGAR IS FINE) across the front of the envelope. Relieved, she crawled back into bed, taking the letter with her, and put on her reading glasses to peruse it.

"Dear Tabby,

Yes, he's perfectly well - only worn out from the trip. I thought it would be best if I kept him here till you arrived for Christmas, though I could send him back by Floo if you wish. I'm afraid you'll have to stop letting him make these long flights. If I can swallow my pride and admit I'm too stiff and creaky to play Quidditch the way I used to, he can swallow his enough to avoid killing himself on a mail run.

Anyway, he is well fed - no, he did not stuff himself; I made certain of that - and has been sleeping almost since he arrived last night. And so I find myself free to answer your very welcome letter."

Minerva closed her eyes for a minute, imagining the scene: Sugar asleep with his head tucked under one wing, a fire crackling in the fireplace, and Albus sitting at the desk where he wrote all his letters, scribbling away and pausing now and again to dip the quill in his rock-crystal inkwell. The image sparked a sudden, sharp pang of homesickness. Before it could get any worse, she hastened on to the next paragraph.

"Regarding your difficulties with the cold and the Beauxbatons caretaker, I'm afraid I have very little useful advice for you, except to say that bad weather always passes, but a caretaker's bad temper rarely does. Try not to annoy him. You never know when you may need his services. I myself had to call young Mr. Filch in the middle of the night recently to repair an infuriating leak in my bathroom, and had I not already taken the time to get on his good side, he might very well have left me to suffer slow torture until morning."

I was pleased to hear about your trip to Paris. Next time you go, be sure to visit Cafe Voltaire on the Left Bank. Paul Gauguin and I had a very interesting conversation there over a bottle of wine one afternoon."

That made her grin. Of course he had. He had a knack for meeting people - such an amazing knack that she would have suspected some of his tales were invented if she hadn't seen his scrapbooks. The letter from Queen Victoria, thanking him for visiting her at Balmoral, was especially impressive. So was the photograph of him with Harry Houdini, who really had been a wizard pretending to be a Muggle pretending to be a wizard. It was no surprise to her that Albus had found Houdini's double disguise delightful. He loved that sort of thing.

In the next part of the letter, however, Dumbledore became serious, and Minerva found herself squirming uncomfortably as she read.

"I fear you thought I was prying when I asked if you had met anyone, but I assure you, that was not my intention.

I know you think I worry over nothing, and I also know you're quite capable of taking care of yourself. I don't worry for that reason. It is your happiness that concerns me - and that brings me to another question. You say you are content, and I believe it, but are you happy, Minerva? Truly happy?"

_Oh, Albus. You would have to ask me that, wouldn't you?_

She set the sheet of parchment carefully aside and lay staring up at the border around the ceiling. A gang of painted children romped through it, picking fruit and flowers and letting out bursts of barely audible giggles.

She _wasn't _truly happy, and Albus surely knew it. As to whether he knew why, she could only guess. Yes, she was near the top of her field already, which was a remarkable achievement for someone her age - thirty, in wizarding terms, was hardly more than a teenager. She had an excellent position here, and could probably get her job at Hogwarts back whenever she wanted it. She sat on panels and published papers in all the transfiguration journals. But good as all that was, she still felt something was missing. It irked her no end to admit that it was something so cliche as romance, but she supposed it was.

No one could say she hadn't tried to rectify that situation. For once, Albus was not in possession of all the facts. She'd had a couple of brief relationships during the last few years, neither of which she'd bothered to inform him about; close as they were, there were some topics she just didn't want to discuss with him. Her romantic forays were right at the head of that short list.

Both of the wizards she'd met had been nice - she certainly hoped she knew enough by now to stay away from the bad sort - but they had disappointed her, and she them. It was her own fault. No one could measure up to the impossible standard she applied to everyone she met. No one could be Albus but Albus.

Of course, she was not waiting for Albus to miraculously come around and decide he wanted to be with her. It simply wasn't going to happen. And she wasn't pining away, either. Her feelings for him had matured and mellowed as she'd gotten older, shifting from constant extremes of elation and misery to deep affection and wistfulness for what could have been, if only -

If only she were older. If only he were younger. If only they'd met under different circumstances. There were a hundred of those "if onlys." None of them changed what _was_. They were friends; good, true, close friends; and friendship like that was more valuable, and harder to come by, than romance. She was grateful for it. She was content. And if she wasn't truly happy, she would just have to live with it.

Proud of her resolve, she picked up the letter again and finished reading. "But enough of that. I'm very glad you'll be coming for Christmas. I'll see to it that your old room is ready for you - no one is living in it at the moment, there should be no trouble over you staying there.

As for the socks, I'm sure they will be just what I need. My brother Aberforth used to make winter clothes out of felted goat hair and give them to us all for the holidays. Sheep-socks will doubtless be even better.

Eagerly awaiting your arrival,

A.D."

Minerva laughed out loud into the silence of her opulent, empty room. The idea of Albus opening a gaily-wrapped pair of goat-hair trousers was too funny to resist. Still snorting with laughter and wiping her eyes, she lay in bed reading the best parts of the letter over and over until she fell asleep.

end


End file.
